Chapter 3: Introduction in English
Section 1: Relevance of information for the final achievement of prosperityIn the beginning of 1999 I ventured into a project of very special significance with Mr. Oswald Van Der Dijs of the Lovers Industrial Corporation. Oswald and I met for the first time in late 1998, and we talked. He had been thinking about the problems confronting his native island for a long time and wanted to do something about the direction in which things were going. I had been pondering along the same lines. I had also been working upon a trajectory of providing information, since I had detected, that one of the missing links on the road towards a positive development was the lack of information.

Oswald and I embarked on what we defined to become the Prosperity Foundation, defining this not as just an additional construction to enlarge the jungle of similar entities already weighing down the island, but as a tangible road towards the achievement of prosperity for all the inhabitants of Curaçao. Per end 1999 he decided to abandon the project for the time being, and him being the sole financial bone, the decision placed the development of the foundation on a standstill. But I was to continue on the quest created, having by then built into the doublesided notion that would lead to this point in time. One of the sides of the notion was the realization, that the Curaçao population believes that the main cause for the lack of positive development on the island can be ascribed to a disfunctioning of the governmental structure in general. The research that I was to eventually undertake into this topic, would lead to two very distinctive achievements:

• first the exposure of the correct legal basis of the Antillian and Curaçao governmental systems, versus the violations that local politicians inflict upon this legality in their daily electoral and governmental practice;
• second, the desire and need of making this information available to the public would bring me into my first experience with the construction of and placement of information on the world wide web.

The second notion surfacing out of the investigation was the one related to the availability of information about the island. Fact is, that there is a large body of data available and I am able to dramatically ascertain this, after my experience with the digital translation of the Encyclopedie Nederlandse Antillen. Fact is also, however, that this information is quite hard to access. As I was going through the process of discovering the data pertinent to my research on the governmental system of the Netherlands Antilles, and with the need to make this information available as broadly and yet as economically as possible, and experiencing the quickness, detailing possibility and staying power of information on the Internet, I was very much encouraged to direct the creation of the database of information on Curaçao upon this medium. I wanted this newly amassed information to be just one click away – I even developed a new slogan for this in Papiamentu (Click! Ata informashon!- Click! There’s your information!).

In the end, the Internet was destined to become my logical choice. I had been exposed to one of the most primitive expressions of Internet-type information since young: My father presented me with my first encyclopedia (New Age) since I was just eight years old. Then in the late 1990’s, when my printed New Age was replaced by the electronic Encarta, I could hardly not notice how much more efficient it was to retrieve information, and that it was also in fact possible – and quite effortlessly and economically at that - to update the basic database. A revision of a printed encyclopedia is a rather costly and extensive project. Thusly the basic premise was set: My click-there’s-your-information project would become a digital encyclopedia made available on the Internet.

On the road towards this destination, I was educated additionally in the objective of providing prosperity to the Curaçao population. When we wrote down the first notes regarding the Prosperity Foundation, both Oswald and I made sure to include thoughts upon the need for spiritual well-being and education also. While doing this at that time, now some eight years ago, I was constantly positively surprised at how uncomplicated it was to get information on so called rich countries. Well developed countries by another definition. The G8 top industrial countries of the world in fact or simply the United States, Western Europe and Japan. Researchers in those countries have made it a premise to investigate and make available all kinds of data, that surely contribute profoundly to the well-being of their inhabitants. A prosperous person is certainly the one, who has, to paraphrase into that famous saying by a former US president ‘a car in every garage; a chicken in every pot’. But that same person lacks in prosperity if not adequately provided with worldly knowledge and spirituality. Availability of good information thusly is one more, and probably the final ingredient to the achievement of prosperity. I hope and know for certain, that the creation of this curaçao-encyclopedia is to contribute to that.

Section 2: Six steps towards final stage curaçao-encyclopediaThe first step entailed the digital translation of the text of the printed Encyclopedie Nederlandse Antillen, a task that was begun on December 4, 2006 and was recently cocncluded on November 15, 2007. We had projected a longer time for this section, but the work became smoother as we progressed.

The second stage is to include a photobook: The digital transformation of all the illustrations in the printed encyclopedia. Since the curaçao-encyclopedia is airborne already, we need not wait to make this photobook available to the public, we will be uploading material as we scan along. All the more so, since the first version of this photobook is to contain up to 1.500 illustrations.

The third and fourth steps are to be executed almost simultaneously. These will entail the updating of the data and the inclusion of new material. The Encyclopedie Nederlandse Antillen was originally introduced in 1969, and the most current version dates back to 1985. The information there then is almost a quarter century old, and needs to be urgently modernized. In addition, Curaçao has been subject to quite an extensive development in the past 23 years. There are new personalities, new projects, new developments. These need to be researched, documented, digitalized and made available on the website. It is quite an undertaking, but a very satisfying and learning process.

The final step into the creation of this most elaborate fountain of good information on Curaçao is the re-creation of the website with amongst others a sophisticated presentation and search function, plus the translation of the works into the other languages that are generally used on the island. We intend to do this translation in-house, that is if no other group rises up to take care of this formidable task in the meantime. Anybody out there willing to take this engagement onto their shoulders is welcome.

Section 3: Navigating the site: The search engine
There are two different search modes available to fascilitate your pursuit of information on the site.
Mode 1: This one is the more basic of the two options. Here the researcher would typically be interested in checking the frequency of appearance of a word inside the entire encyclopedia, one of the letter-groups into which it is divided (six groups of four words each) or just one of the 26 letters of the alphabet. The operation here is straightforward: Just activate the engine by pressing {control (ctrl) f = find}, followed by the corresponding word, and be prepared to take notes as the process of uncovering the word throughout the encyclopedia evolves.
Mode 2: This second search mode is quite a bit more elaborate, but it is to relieve the researcher who might become frustrated while searching not for a word, but for a specific topic of interest. The encyclopedia includes thousands of words, many appearing tens or hundreds of times, and mode 1 is clearly not the most efficient way of finding a topic. Mode 2 entails a more effective way, and it encompasses the following steps:
1. First the researcher needs to activate the letter-group of the particular topic of his / her interest, which is fascillitated by the fact, that the main information heading containing amongst others these six letter-groups, is in constant view while one is on the curaçao-encyclopedia site.
2. Secondly, he / she may narrow down the search by calling up the particular letter. All letter sections are headed by their letter, appropriately preceded by a sign that says de letter! Since the researcher now is already in the correct group, navigating to the letter aspired for is simpler. Just type the search criteria de letter … into the search engine and along it zooms one there. If for example the researcher is looking for the article on Curaçao, and after activating the first letter-group (A-D) he / she in this next step would type either de letter c or just letter c to get to that section in the quickest possible way. For obvious reasons, it is not very efficient to just typing “c”! To make the voyage towards letters more interesting, a short description of it is included.
3. Next the researcher is now ready to find his / her topic. To fascillitate this process, the encyclopedia has been revised for the addition of the heading @: to every main article title and several subheaders also. Pay attention to the fact, that the punctuation mark used here is the so called mousetail and not the letter a! Pay attention to the presence of the colon also, which also needs to be included into this particular heaeder if the researcher wishes the search engine to navigate to this direction and not to the punctuation mark incorporated as part of an e-mail address. Here then is the easiest way of finding a particular topic in the curaçao-encyclopedia: if the researcher is looking for example for the topic “Curaçao” he / she would now type @: Curaçao (pay attention to the space between the header and the topic-word) and the search engine takes him / her there. In this particular example of the topic Curaçao, the researcher may find that even after following steps 1 and 2, that there is still one slight detour, but imagine looking up Curaçao in mode 1, and the benefits of using the second option are quite evident. There is another slight problem with the word Curaçao, which we will speak about below. This has to do with the special punctuation mark ç. 4. To make the search for main and sub topics easier, we have also revised the encyclopedia for a division of long articles into pieces. Read more about this also in the upcoming part.

The definition of topics to be hunted for also presents some difficulties. Some examples: Since for the time being there is not going to be a translation, local researchers who favor Papiamentu are forced to search for Curaçao instead of Kòrsou, which is the Papiamentu translation of the name of the island. But how are we to search for the former Antillian airline company for example? Is it ALM, A.L.M. or Antilliaanse Luchtvaarmaatschappij? And how do we go about dealing with titles that feauture those strange words from especially Papiamentu or Spanish origins, that feature strange symbols? Our fascillitating program here again comes to the rescue:
• the researcher will find references towards the correct direction in the case of alternative titles. An example: The encyclopedia article about the national theather is entitled Centro Pro Arte instead of the Sentro Pro Arte that advocates of Papiamentu might be tempted to use. Pay attention to the first letter c versus s! If looking first for Sentro Pro Arte he / she is to find a reference towards Centro Pro Arte.
• A large number of standard to the Encyclopedie Nederlandse Antillen article titles have been extended with additional descriptions, in the way we assume a researcher may be looking for the topic. Each of course preceded by the header @:. For example, the standard writing format for that high profile Curaçao politician in the Encyclopedie Nederlandse Antillen is Gomez, Moises Frumencio da Costa. We have extended that to look as follows:
@: Gomez, Moises Frumencio da Costa / @: Doktoor Moises Frumencio da Costa Gomez / @: Doktoor da Costa Gomez / @: Moises da Costa Gomez / @: Frumencio da Costa Gomez.
As can be seen, each preceded by the @: heading. In this way the researcher is sure to find the topic very very quickly. By updating the layout in this way, we were able to eliminate several references, which has made for a better looking layout also.
• and what about those strange words that feature strange symbols from especially Papiamentu and Spanish backgrounds? For this we invented first a goede schrijfwijze woordenlijst (how-to-write-words-good list) that also features names. Some examples: The correct word is aloë not aloe; biná no bina, koloniër not kolonier, but also María no Maria and even (landhuis) Savonèt and not Savonet. We strongly advise the researcher to check this list at Hoofdstuk 5 (chapter 5)
• In addition we include a list of how to write those symbols, so that the researcher does not need to despair anytime he fronts one of these strange words

Finally: As indicated above, some of the encyclopedia articles are very long. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Antillen and Bevolking van de Nederlandse Antillen are two that come to mind. The researcher here might not just be on the look for the main article, but rather for a subtopic. He / she then wants to know quickly about the whether and where of the appearance of that subtopic. Or the indiscriminating researcher just wants to get an idea beforehand of what is included. For this, we have subdivided these long articles into sections (in Dutch) as follows: hoofdstuk; sectie; paragraaf; deel, grouped at the beginning in an inhoudsopgave(table of contents). To navigate effectively within the topic, it is best for the researcher to use the same arrangement included in this table of contents.

After a while, and with the experience acquired through this information, the researcher is going to find, that he / she can navigate very quickly through the site by simply activating the @: header followed by the subject title into the search engine immediately after clicking the particular lettergroup. The above recommendations then become superfluous. But as they say: If all else fails, follow instructions, and remember, that the encyclopedia still needs to be updated and extended. So, if you are unable to find a particular subject, then maybe it just has not been included yet. If you let us know about this subject, we may be able to direct you to the proper location for information. Or if you have additional information upon topics already in the curaçao-encyclopedia, you may want - and we would certainly appreciate that - to share it with us? Be sure then to contact us through the mechanism included.

Section 4: Accreditation
An encyclopedia is not a project that is executed by one man alone, even if this first edition of the curaçao-encyclopedia has been undertaken by just one person. But just as soon as the website construction more people had to be involved: Jora de Jong and her artists at Spin Webdesignto whom we found it appropriate to extend a special word of thanks at the beginning (welcome section) already.
Certainly the printed Encyclopedie Nederlandse Antillen, that lies at the basis of this digital version was a project that involved a lot of people. The first version appeared in 1969, and the most recently revised one dates back to 1985. It was introduced by the late Dr. René A. Römer, amongst others, ex governor of the Netherlands Antilles, and presided by another illustrious Curaçao citizen, Dr. Jules Ph. De Palm. The original production also includes a list of the other collaborators, which we will in time include on this site. At this place, we would like to extend a most sincere word of gratitude to them for this outstanding work

Section 5: You too can collaborate in extending the curaçao-encyclopedia / end wordsEvery researcher or interested reader can contribute material. Preferably in digital form, but we also accept printed, typed, and even written data, as long as our scanner is able to process the information, however. We prefer contributions in Dutch, but we also accept those in one of the other three languages, that are generally spoken on the island: Papiamentu of course, but also English and Spanish. This material will be processed in the same language as delivered (for the time being, there will not be a translation of the basic material), yet it is going to be included in the encyclopedia using a Dutch alphabetical sequence. Meaning that the researcher needs to be able to find his / her way in that language, especially for none name topic titles or bring along his own translator. As indicated before, we will eventually translate the curaçao-encyclopedia in the other languages common to the island, and in the meantime we will do our utmost to accommodate researchers who have no proficiency in Dutch. You may always contact us through the contact-mechanism with your requests, and we will be glad to help as far as we can. That our translation of the encyclopedia into other languages is to take time, by no means should entail, that this part of the project should wait. Anyone out there, who thinks being able to do the job or to suggest a way in which we can do the translation earlier is welcome to react.
I am very proud of having had the privilege of translating the printed work of the patriarchs into this digital expression. Even from this moment on, valuable information on Curaçao especially can be had here. Very soon, this site is to be a goldmine, to which you are sure to return frequently, as you are converting it into your own useable tool for investigating beloved Curaçao